Human Development Flashcards
Why do changes occur over the lifespan?
Can occur due to physical maturation, be shaped by experience or a combination
Nature and nurture
What is the post hoc fallacy?
Assuming that things that occur first cause things that occur after the fact.
Not the case
What did Hart and Ridley find about children with greater vocabularies?
What are some explanations?
Parents who speak to their children a lot produce children with larger vocabularies than parent who do not speak to their offspring as much.
Can be either nature or nurture - environmental or perhaps they are genetically predisposed
How might nature and nurture work together?
Tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of these predispositions
Eg. Extroverts may deliberately engage with others like themselves
Explain gene expression
Some genes ‘turn on’ only in response to specific environmental events
Eg. Temp sensitive allele in Himalayan rabbits
What is epigenetics?
External modifications to DNA that turn genes on or off.
No change to underlying DNA sequence (phenotype change) affects how cells read the genes
What is the niche-picking hypothesis
Genetically similar people will select similar environments this leading to similar IQ.
Genetic predisposition influences individuals to tend towards environments that accentuate the disposition. Leading to increased heritability throughout their lifespan.
Supports the influence of genetics on IQ
What is an implication of gene expression?
Children with genes that predispose them to anxiety may never become anxious unless a highly stressful even could trigger these genes to become active
What are some examples of epigenetics?
DNA methylation: addition of a methyl group (chemical caps that stop a gene from being expressed)
Histone modification: A protein that DNA wraps around. Squeezes it tightly so can’t be read.
Can relax the host ones to make the DNA accessible to be read
Behavioural epigenetics?
Understanding how the expression of genes is influenced by experiences and the environment to produce individual differences in behaviour, personality, cognition and mental health
Lamarak hypothesis?
Organism can pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring.
Inheritance of acquired characteristics
Relates to natural selection
What is a cross sectional design?
Benefits? Down sides?
A design in which researchers examine people who are of different ages and a single point in time
Convenient- quick
Cohort effects
What are cohort affects?
A cohort effect occur when a commonly aged group of people in research indirectly affect results due to their common age-related influences
Eg. Younger people better at computer tasks
What is a longitudinal design?
Benefits
Cons
Tracking the development of the same group of people over time.
Every person is their own control. Stops cohort effects
Time consuming, expensive and problem with participant attrition (if they don’t keep coming back etc)
Explain bilateral influence
Development and experience have bidirectional influences on each other. Two way street.
Eg. Parents influence their children’s behaviour which in turn influences parents reactions.
What is a zygote?
A fertilised egg. Made of up genetic material
What is an embryo?
A developing baby (up to eighth week of gestation)
What is a fetus?
After the eighth week of pregnancy and until birth occurs
What are some obstacles to normal fetal development
- Premature birth
- Low birth weight
- Exposure to hazardous environmental influences
- Biological influences resulting from genetic disorders or errors in cell duplication during cell division
What is the viability point?
The point in pregnancy at which infants can typically survive on its own (25 weeks)
What are teratogens?
Environmental factors that can affect prenatal development negatively. They range from drugs and alcohol to chicken pox and xrays.
What is fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD)?
Collection of disorders caused by prenatal exposure to alcohol.
Explain infant reflexes
Infants are born with a large set of automatic motor behaviours or reflex they fulfil important survival needs
Eg. Sucking reflex
Motor skill development in infants?
Fine and gross motor skills develop in a predictable way
They emerge in a sequence from the head to the feet from the centre of the body outwards
Differences in motor skill development between genders?
Females: develop fine motor skills more quickly (drawing, stringing beads)
Males: develop gross motor skills quicker (jumping or climbing)
Brain development?
Around 8 to 9 years of age the brain experiences growth increases to nearly the same size as an adult brain
Is different parts of the brain develops such as the frontal lobes children’s cognitive capacity increases
What are primary sex characteristics?
Physical features such as the reproductive organs and genitals that distinguish the sexes
What are secondary sex characteristics?
Sex differentiating characteristics that do not relate directly to reproduction such as breast enlargement and deepening voices
Sexual maturing?
Puberty. Dramatic bodily changes and an intensification in sexual interest. Driven by changes in primary and secondary sex characteristics
When do adults reach their peak on strength, agility, stamina’s day vigour?
During their 20’s
What do adults over 30 show a decline in?
Balance coordination and reaction time
When does fertility begin to decline and are there any gendered differences?
Declines rapidly after 35.
Women fertile until 50 (menopause - estrogen levels drop)
Men remain fertile for longer but sperm quality decreases
Who is piaget?
Stage theorist.
Said children do not think like adults they are not miniature adults - they think qualitatively differently
Explain piagets sensorimotor stage
Children’s main sources of knowledge thinking and experience are their physical interactions with the world.
Includes accomodation and assimilation
No concept of object permanence: which is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view
What is assimilation?
When children integrate Information learned from experience into their existing understanding of the world
E.g. a child seeing a zebra for the first time and calling it a horse
What is accommodation?
They modify or create new scheme is as a result of experience in a process called accommodation
for example seeing a cow for the first time and calling it a horse he then learns that it is a different animal entirely and develops a new schema
What are object performance tasks
Show ability of object permanence
Explain Piaget’s pre-operational stage
2-7 years
Ability to construct mental representations of experience
They have object performance but are egocentric.
Tested through conservation tasks
What does egocentric mean?
Cannot see the world through anyone else’s eyes but their own
What are conservation tasks?
Asks to examine 2 equal amounts of liquid. First in the same size containers before pouring I toe two different size containers.
To succeed, they need to say that the amounts remain the same even though they remain equal
What is piagets concrete operational stage?
7-11 years.
Ability to perform mental operations (but only for actual physical events)
LOGICAL THOUGHT
Can understand which actions can or cannot affect concrete objects can also perform organisational tasks but need personal experience as an anchor for the mental representations
What is piagets formal operations stage?
Emerges in adolescence children acquire the capacity to reason about abstract concepts this is the most sophisticated type of thinking includes hypothetical reasoning
What are some criticisms of piagets theory?
Research suggests development is more continuous than stage like
there is a potential under estimate of children’s abilities
they found children to reach the stage is earlier
and it is culturally biased
What is vygotskys theory of human development?
He was interested in how social and cultural factors influence learning he observed parents and other caretakers tend to structure the learning environment for their children (scaffolding)
Zone of proximal development
What is the zone of proximal development
Where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be given
Difference between what they can do with help and what they can do without help
What are violation of expectation experiments?
Contradict object permanence assumptions.
Contradicts Piaget as object permanence has been demonstrated in infants as young as 3 1/2 months of age
Are there any evidence that contradicts egocentricity?
Recent data shows that toddlers choose foods that they know the other person prefers even if they don’t like that food
What are theory of mind experiments
They test the ability to attribute mental states such as knowledge to others and to reflect on ones own mental states
(Sally Anne experiment - moving the object and looking in the place it is moved)
Children can succeed at this task at around age four or five which is earlier than piagets model suggests
What is temperament
It is a Childs characteristic pattern of emotional reactivity these differences tend to remain stable across the lifespan
Is temperament genetic
Temperament emerges early and appears to be largely genetically influenced
How does the limbic system play a role in temperament
Babies with a highly reactive limbic system are more likely to have a strong reaction to potentially stressful situations
this emotional style is largely contributed by our genes
What is stranger anxiety
Refers to the tendency for infants to feel uncomfortable or frightened when approached by someone they do not know
8 to9 months
Begins when they are starting to crawl around on their own and this is an evolutionary perspective
What is separation anxiety
Involves the developmentally normal fear of being away from a trusted caregiver
What is attachment
Refers to the bond that forms between newborns and their primary caregivers
Are there any differences in attachment
The quality of the bond strongly influences an individual’s social relationships throughout their lifespan
What is the evolution perspective of attachment
It insures the infants don’t stray too far away from their carer
Explain a secure attachment style
The parent characteristics are loving attentive responsive to child’s needs
Therefore the child characteristics are comfortable confident willing to explore intends to use their caregiver as a safe base
Explain a insecure-avoidant attachment style
The parents are dismissive of a child’s needs not physically and emotionally available therefore child characteristics are independent and tend not to seek out caregiver for comfort
Explain insecure ambivalent attachment type
The parents are inconsistent in response to childs needs to consistently physically and emotionally available therefore the child is anxious maybe hesitant to leave their caregiver and resistant to being comforted
Explain a disorganised disorientated attachment type
The parents are severely neglectful and it can be in the case of clinical depression or substance use and potentially abusive therefore the child is fearful goes from being highly affectionate being hostile towards the caregiver
Odd and confused behaviours towards parents
What is imprinting
Is a basic form of attachment
Who came up with imprinting
Conrad Lorenz
goslings and ducklings highlight the process of in imprinting the early sensory experience modified behaviour permanently
When is imprinting influential
There are specially influential in early life during windows called critical periods
What is imprinting like in humans
It is softer form with imprinting you forge strong connections with those who tend to us shortly after birth
What else is a critical or sensitive period important for
Learning is less efficient
What is contact comfort
Harlow came up with this
positive emotions by touch
The monkey experiment was with two false mothers one had milk but was made of wire, the other is cuddly they preferred the comfort over nourishment when they experienced a scary stimuli they were much likely to run to the comfort mother
What are the parenting styles
Parenting styles can be divided into four types based on two dimensions of warmth and control
Permissive authoritative authoritarian and uninvolved
What is a permissive parenting style
Low controlling behaviour and high warmth
The parent doesn’t in force rules and showers the child with affection the kids are impulsive and disregard rules
What is the uninvolved parenting style
The parents have low warmth and low control their own involved and pay little attention meaning the kids have post school performance and are involved in risky behaviours
What is the authoritative parenting style
It balances warmth with clear limits and promotes healthy development there supportive sit clear and firm limits and create a positive relationship to create capable self-assured and popular kids
What is a authoritarian parenting style
Very high control and low warmth they have high expectations and demands obedience. Are strict and there is little opportunity for play and exploration for the child - they are unhappy and have low self-esteem
Who is Erickson and what did he propose about identity development
Suggested that individuals proceed through several stages of development throughout their lifespan
Each stage corresponds to a developmental period and involves a conflict to be resolved
As we negotiate each stage each identity crisis we acquire more fleshed out sense of who we are
What happens in the trust versus miss trust stage
If needs are met infants develop a sense of basic trust
What is the autonomy versus shame and doubt stage
Toddlers learn to exercise the wheel and do things for themselves or they doubt their abilities
What is the initiative versus guilt stage
Preschool is learn to initiate tasks and carry out plans or they feel guilty about the efforts to be independent
What is the confidence versus inferiority stage
Children learn the pleasure of applying themselves to tasks or they feel inferior
What is the identity versus role confusion stage
Teenagers work at with finding a sense of self by testing roles and then integrating them to form a single identity or they become confused about who they are
What is the intimacy versus isolation stage
Young adults struggle to form close relationships and to gain the capacity for intimate love or they feel socially isolated
What is the generativity versus stagnation stage
In middle age people discover a sense of contributing to the world usually through family and work or they may feel a lack of purpose
What is the integrity versus despair stage
Reflecting on his or her life and older adult may feel a sense of satisfaction or failure
What is Kolbergs moral development contribution
He expanded piagets work.
Was three stages that occur in order but individuals my pass through different rates these stages are pre-conventional morality, conventional morality and post conventional morality
What is the pre-conventional morality stage
There’s a focus on punishment and reward.
What is the conventional morality stage
Focus on societal values what is approved of or disapproved of by society
What is the post conventional morality stage
There is internal moral principles that may be different from conventional society values
Are there any criticisms of Kohlbergs theory of moral development?
Kohlberg’s theory has been criticized for its cultural and gendered bias toward white, upper-class men and boys. It also fails to account for inconsistencies within moral judgments.
